Residents of the United Arab Emirates have absorbed more than 2,800 Iranian strikes on their soil since the current conflict began, yet a sitting U.S. senator told CNN in July that it was now their “turn to go in and finish the job.” That remark, from Senator Roger Marshall, captures the bind ordinary Emiratis find themselves in: their government has staked the country’s security on a Western alliance that treats Arab partners as instruments rather than equals.
The public cost of that gamble is mounting. Support for the Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization agreement with Israel that the UAE’s leadership championed as a path to stability, has collapsed among the country’s own residents. In late 2020, 47 percent supported the deal. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 25 percent. The war in Gaza has deepened the fracture further. In 2024, an Israeli rabbi representing Chabad in Abu Dhabi was kidnapped in Dubai and murdered, a sign of how badly the government’s foreign policy has diverged from the sentiments of the people living under it.
The population itself is a complicating factor. Only about 12 percent of UAE residents are citizens; the remaining 88 percent are expatriates, guest workers, or stateless individuals. Less than one percent of the population serves in the military. The country’s leadership is making decisions that expose millions of people, most of whom have no political voice and no citizenship rights, to the consequences of a war they did not choose.
Meanwhile, the military exposure is severe. Iran possesses more than ten times the UAE’s ground troops, along with thousands of ballistic missiles and drones. In August, Iranian forces struck multiple Emirati ships in the Strait of Hormuz. During a monthlong ceasefire that ended in July, Iran targeted Emirati economic infrastructure, including the oil port in Fujairah. Iran has directed more counterstrikes at Emirati territory than at Bahrain, Kuwait, or Qatar, all of which host critical American military bases. The people and infrastructure absorbing those strikes are not abstractions. Fujairah’s port is a lifeline for fuel and goods moving through the Gulf.
How the UAE arrived at this exposed position is a story decades in the making. When the country gained independence from Britain in 1971, its founding president, Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, declared that “no Arab country is safe from the perils of the battle with Zionism unless it plays its role.” The UAE signed the Arab League boycott of Israel in 1972 and contributed more than a hundred million dollars to Egypt and Syria’s 1973 effort to reclaim occupied territory. Beneath that public posture, however, a covert relationship with Israel was already forming. Israeli journalist Yossi Melman told the Washington Post that intelligence links between the two countries date to the 1970s, eventually producing what he described as a “revolving door” between Emirati corporations and Mossad.
A 2005 episode accelerated the shift in how the UAE defined itself. When Dubai Ports World, a state-owned logistics company, sought to acquire a British firm that would have given it control over major U.S. ports, including a terminal in New Jersey, Congress blocked the deal despite President Bush’s support. Senator Richard Shelby argued that a company from a region where “support for Al Qaeda is very strong” warranted suspicion. According to Andreas Krieg, a security expert at King’s College London, the episode was a turning point. “It showed the Emiratis that they were being perceived as just another Muslim, or just another Middle Eastern, country,” Krieg explained. The UAE responded by pursuing what has been called “Emirati exceptionalism,” trading pan-Arab solidarity for the role of America’s most reliable Arab partner. A 2015 security report noted that the UAE was “the only Arab country to participate in six coalition actions with the U.S. since the First Gulf War.” It even bombed another Arab state when it joined the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in 2011.
The Abraham Accords formalized what had long been covert. Emirati Ambassador Yousef al Otaiba had already written in a Hebrew-language Israeli newspaper that the UAE wanted to see “Israel as an opportunity, not an enemy.” After the Accords were signed in September 2020, military investment and technology deals followed. Yom HaZikaron, a commemoration of Israeli fallen soldiers, was observed for the first time in an Arab capital. In 2023, months before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli Embassy held an Independence Day celebration in Abu Dhabi where Emirati and Israeli singers performed a duet of “Hatikvah.”
The scale of current military coordination is striking. After American forces began bombing Iran on February 28, Israel sent Iron Dome batteries and soldiers to operate them to the UAE. In May, according to Bloomberg, the two countries conducted joint strikes on Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh. Mossad director David Barnea made multiple visits to the UAE in the spring to share intelligence and help select targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the UAE a “stalwart partner.” On May 4, the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared the country “will not tolerate any threat to its security and sovereignty under any circumstances,” reserving “its full and legitimate right to respond to these unprovoked attacks” by Iran. The statement came weeks after the UAE’s air force struck Iran’s oil refinery on Lavan, a Persian Gulf island and major export terminal, just hours after the U.S. and Iran had declared a ceasefire on April 8.
The UAE’s Emirati Foreign Affairs Minister Anwar Gargash, at the end of April, criticized the “weak stance” of both the Arab League and fellow Gulf states on Iran. The following day, the UAE announced it would leave OPEC. The country’s leadership is now more isolated from its Arab neighbors than at any point in its history, having shed the regional solidarity that once offered a degree of collective protection.
What the UAE receives in return remains the open question. The U.S. has reportedly encouraged the UAE to seize the Iranian island it struck in April, but American commitment to backing such an effort is uncertain. Senator Marshall’s remark suggests Washington’s view of its Arab partner’s role: useful for absorbing strikes and conducting operations, but not quite deserving of the protection extended to other allies. For the millions of people living in the UAE, citizens and non-citizens alike, that calculation is not an abstraction. It is the daily reality of a government that has chosen a side in a war and left its population to bear the consequences.